


like stone.

by foundCarcosa



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-22
Updated: 2013-03-22
Packaged: 2017-12-06 03:59:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/731227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one knows what happened to bring Sula Tabris into the Wardens, but that doesn't lessen the effect it has on her and her companions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like stone.

The first time Zevran tries to take her into his arms, Sula Tabris turns into something harder than Shale and shoves him to the grass.

She apologises sullenly, her jade eyes still like chips of the gemstone to which he compared them, and Zevran, stunned but accommodating, nods and smiles briefly before retreating to his own tent for the night.

Morrigan makes him the recipient of her death-glares for the entire day following, and Zevran, disturbed but accustomed, shrugs it off and keeps up his teasing of senior Warden Alistair.  
Only Morrigan, sometimes-insomniac Morrigan, heard Sula go down to the stream in the middle of the night and scrub herself ruddy, her furious tears muffled by the incessant babbling of the water.

\--

Sometimes Sula puts her daggers down, smirks at Zevran's ribald ribbing, listens to a casually-embellished tale of his whilst gnawing on a piece of salted beef. He might see a faint smile flash across that sharp face when he rough-houses with her mabari, or see the muscles in her shoulders loosen a bit when Leliana sings softly at the campfire. But these are glimpses, flashes of rainbow in a prism, flickers of sunlight through a forest's dense canopy.

Sula Tabris is golem-stone and unfinished edges, and Zevran has been around enough to know that this likely meant whatever is beneath that is more precious than Antivan spice or Rivaini gold.  
But it's been snatched at, violated, sullied, and she isn't letting that happen twice.

"I wish not to hurt you, my dear, never to hurt you," Zevran attempts to reassure her, but she shoots him a hard, tight-lipped look that stills the words in his throat.

"The road to the Golden City was paved with the wishes of men," she whispers, harshness lining her tongue and lending barbs to her words.

\--

 

"You can have anyone, Zevran," Alistair laughs, uneasily. He does not like Sula. She frightens him, and he does not like being frightened, especially by one such as her. "Why bother? She obviously has something against menfolk. Let her and Morrigan be harpies together."

The Warden, the so-called senior Warden, shrinks under Zevran's withering gaze. _He praises that Duncan and his supposed wisdom day in and day out. Did the man teach him anything actually worth knowing...?_ "Quiet, boy. You know nothing."

But for all this, Zevran knows nothing, as well.  
Every step he takes knocks him two backwards. Sula's jaw flexes as she stares at him with that inscrutable gaze some nights, as if she is forcing a torrent of words to stay locked behind her teeth, and Zevran begs her with his eyes -- _tell me, my love; I will keep your secrets, one and all_ \-- but she won't tell him, she won't.

Wynne watches them in their strange cold war, the Warden and the assassin, her weapons always drawn and his weapons always failing, and she knows, she _knows_ the way Sula tenses tight as a lute's string every time Zevran's body draws near, she _knows_ the marks in Sula's bottom lip from viciously biting back unbidden tears, she _knows_ the mage-fire fury that drove her to cut down the werewolves in the forest -- did no one see the look that passed between her and tormented Keeper Zathrian when she returned? -- but for once in her life, she does not interfere.

\--

"He will never understand you," Morrigan confides, but Sula's sharp, scornful look is not the one she expects.  
"He will understand me long before you do," Sula retorts. "You who knows so little of the minds of men."

\--

By the time they walk through the gates of Denerim, Zevran is just learning the feel of Sula's skin under his fingertips.

\--

Alistair backs away, backs out, is gone in an instant. He doesn't even know why he'd come. They don't see him again until the Landsmeet.  
Sten grimaces and lowers his sword, recognising its uselessness for the moment, and his own. He doesn't understand the Warden, but thankfully, he has never needed to.

Zevran's skin shrinks, his stomach going sour. He'd never heard a sound so furious in his life, so feral, and so brutally triumphant as well, as Sula's battle-cry. But he doesn't interfere. He may know nothing, but he is learning.

Sula stops hacking at the mangled, formless body when her hands are too blood-slick to hold the daggers, one and then the other slipping out of her shaky grasp. Her throat feels like hot iron, throbbing with pain, the wordless battle-lusty howling having ravaged it to the point of hoarseness.  
Rendon Howe is barely recognisable, stabbed and ripped in a hundred places, skull caved in, viscera splattered. The room is an abattoir, its slaughterer covered in claret and gore, her tears invisible under the mess.

"Sula," Zevran calls, softly, steadily. He says nothing else -- not "come on", or "are you quite done?", but just her name, her blessed mother-given name.  
It was not planned that way. It is only that when she looks at him, wild-eyed and trembling, more vulnerable than he's ever known her to be, he finds he has nothing else _to_ say.

\--

It is not always failure and heartache for the Antivan.  
The fiftieth time Zevran tries to take her into his arms, as unhurried as ever, Sula Tabris turns into something a little _less_ harder than Shale.


End file.
